Arthur Duff

Arthur Duff (USA) projected love letters onto Old Town Square.

DARLING WAVE
MY CONFUSION FLATLY BRUSHES YOUR BIGOTED IDENTITY. YOU ARE MY MATURE BOD. MY NEED PROPERLY LAUGHS AT YOUR HOSTILE PERSPECTIVE. MY SUBJECTIVE PAST SCRATCHES YOUR DIFFERENCE. MY DARLING FANTASY HURRIEDLY STARTS YELLING FOR YOUR WARNING.
YOURS MYSTERIOUSLY

The letters were generated by combining love letters written between his parents, thirty-eight years ago, using Christopher Strachey’s “Love Letters” program.  This program, designed in 1952 for the Manchester Mark 1, randomly generated love letters. Arthur broke-down his parents love letters by extracting, verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs which he then applied to the skeletal structure of poems generated by Strachey’s program.  The resulting messages will be projected on the Old Town Square using a high-powered green laser with a puzzling yet captivating effect.

With “love Letters” Arthur Duff is interested in the peculiar process of interpretation triggered by the stochastic system of randomly generated text where one’s projections are put on stage, pivoting around a personal mode of reading into and giving meaning to a message.

Arthur Duff was born in Wiesbaden in 1973 to American parents. He has moved often and lived in many different places such as the U.S., South Korea, Germany, Japan and Italy. He has been active and present on the Italian contemporary art scene. He lives in Venice and works in Marghera where he has had a studio for the past four years. He was present in the recent show “The word in art – Research and the avant-garde in the 20^th century” at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum of Trento and Rovereto and has presented site-specific work for the XIV Quadrennial in Rome, the GAM and the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena. His most recent project, “Borrowing You”, was installed in Castelfranco Veneto where he installed a large laser, which projected borrowed words from the city’s inhabitants onto the entire down town of the old medieval city. 

He presently works for Galica contemporary art in Milan and Studio La Cittá in Verona, both of whom he shows with at major international art fairs. He has worked with the Peggy Guggenheim didactic project and has also been collaborating with the newly launched C4–Contemporary Culture Center of Caldogno contributing to their cutting edge approach towards education.